According to the article:

> working with [chatbots] feels like groping through a cave in the dark – a horrible game I call "PromptQuest" – while being told this is improving my productivity.

AI bad, AI bad, AI bad. bad bad bad, AI-bad.

It’s The Register. They’re always more about the ‘tude than substance.

This seems to be someone who has no idea how to use LLMs yelling at clouds. Or maybe just someone pretending to have no idea because it makes for good cloud-yelling.

I actually read the article, so I'm not confused about what it is about.

The problem with zork is that you don’t have a list of all the options in front of you so you have to guess. You could have a menu that lists all the valid options, but that changes the game. It doesn’t require you to use imagination and open-ended thinking, it becomes more of a point’n’click storybook.

But for tools, we should have a clear up front list of capabilities and menu options. Photoshop and VScode give you menu after menu of options with explicit well defined behaviors because they are tools used to achieve a specific aim and not toys for open ended exploration.

An llm doesn’t give you a menu because the llm doesn’t even know what it’s capable of. And that’s why I think we can see such polarized responses - some people want an LLM that’s a supercharged version of a tool, others want a toy for exploration.

A "robot that does things" is the overpromise that doesn't deliver.

I actually agree with the article that non-determinism is why generative AI is the wrong tool in most cases.

In the past, the non-determinism came from the user's inconsistent grammar and the game's poor documentation of its rigid rules. Now the non-determinism comes 100% from the AI no matter what the user does. This is objectively worse!

I make no judgement, but I definitely have had the opposite experience of the author, therefore the article doesn't resonate and I don't even understand it.